Live data from Hacker News

After Spain's blackout, its shift to renewables and grid evolution power on

theguardian.com

1–10 of 44 posts

Re: After Spain's blackout, its shift to renewables and grid evolution power on

#4
The big thing with renewables is that they don't really require ongoing fuel shipments. Spain is not a large producer of any of the major fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal.

While there are certainly issues with the supply chain of certain components of renewables, those effectively cease after installation. And even hydro is not totally immune from supply issues given increasing drought frequencies across the world.

Re: After Spain's blackout, its shift to renewables and grid evolution power on

#5
You should read the report, its a good description of a complex system failing complexly. (well the reasons leading up to it failing were complex)

The interesting thing about spain's grid is that it doesn't have that much battery compared to say the UK (the uk has about 11 gwhr which is about enough to power the entire uk for around 20mins)

The Iberian grid has There is currently a large lucrative market in grid scale batteries being paid to charge at solar noon and getting a 30-50% premium to release the power at peak.

There are only a few companies that are able to vertically integrate solar and battery, so it'll be interesting to see how the prices shape up in the next 5 years. I expect a bunch of batteries to be built and then sold as the market changes shape.

Re: After Spain's blackout, its shift to renewables and grid evolution power on

#6

You should read the report, its a good description of a complex system failing complexly. (well the reasons leading up to it failing were complex) The interesting thing about spain's grid is that it doesn't have that much battery compared to say the UK (the uk has about 11 gwhr which is about enough to power the entire uk for around 20mins) The Iberian grid has There is currently a large lucrative market in grid scal…

Spain is a leader in Hydro. Why they don’t use their dams for storage ?

Re: After Spain's blackout, its shift to renewables and grid evolution power on

#8
The proximal cause of the blackout was a single faulty solar inverter in a PV plant. The distal cause, however, was inappropriate disconnection of wind/solar generation and widespread cascading failure of reactive power support across the grid. Add to that a whole bunch of noncompliant transformers which tripped inappropriately, and Spanish grid operators inability to react appropriately.

Re: After Spain's blackout, its shift to renewables and grid evolution power on

#9

The big thing with renewables is that they don't really require ongoing fuel shipments. Spain is not a large producer of any of the major fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. While there are certainly issues with the supply chain of certain components of renewables, those effectively cease after installation. And even hydro is not totally immune from supply issues given increasing drought frequencies across the world…

When you consider the intermittency of renewables, and you should, fuel suddenly becomes an issue again.

Re: After Spain's blackout, its shift to renewables and grid evolution power on

#10
So renewables didn't cause the blackout per the author, but according to the neutral report [0], solar and wind exacerbated the blackout.

As these renewables and grid change to a different configuration/inverter technology, this problem shouldn't happen again?

[0] https://www.entsoe.eu/publications/blackout/28-april-2025-ib...

Post reply on HN